Re: Namespace-aware APIs do not need to suck

> In today's panel it was pointed out that people do not "get" that the
> real identifier for an element type is a tuple (namespaceURI,
> localName), and thus URI-based extensibility is a problem.

Indeed. Note that this is both a syntax-over-the-wire problem as well as
an API problem.

> My experience in other spaces that use URI-based extensibility is that
> this problem goes away once you use an API that actually takes
> namespaces into account.
[...]
> To address the "tuple" problem, a very simple approach is to use the
> so-called "Clark" notation (<http://www.jclark.com/xml/xmlns.htm>),
> where the tuple (namespaceURI, localName) is simply replaced by the
> string
>
>  {namespaceURI}localName

This would only fix half of the problem, unless you're suggesting that
we use Clark notation *in the markup* as well, e.g.

<{http://www.w3.org/2000/svg}svg>
  ...picture of cat goes here...
</{http://www.w3.org/2000/svg}svg>


Ted